The Killer of Little Shepherds

by Douglas Starr

  “Ten minutes,” responded Bozonet.

  “One single visit of ten minutes sufficed?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Really, I admire the competence and rapidity of judgment of certain people.” Laughter arose from the audience.

  Charbonnier interjected that Bozonet’s diagnosis, rapid though it was, matched that of the director of the Dole asylum. De Coston seemed to pay no attention, but he badgered the doctor about how Madeuf had been able to enter the jail without official permission. After some back-and-forth, Charbonnier rose to object: Did all this really matter? Given that Fourquet freely allowed reporters and photographers access to the prisoner, did it matter that a man of science had entered uninvited?

  The president cut him off. “That’s an administrative question. Call Dr. Madeuf,” he ordered the bailiff.

  After Madeuf was sworn in, de Coston grilled him about his unauthorized entry. Madeuf said that Fourquet had told him that he had no objection to his visit as long as the prison doctor approved—which was the opposite of what Dr. Bozonet had said.

  “Actually, you lied to the doctor,” said de Coston, “and now you are lying again.” He held up a deposition signed by Fourquet; it stated that he had surprised Madeuf inside the prison and that he immediately protested the unauthorized presence. “Now, what do you have to say?”

  Madeuf said that none of this mattered compared with the good that came from his visit. After all, it was he, Madeuf, who had discovered the bullet in the defendant’s ear.

  “That’s false!” asserted the president. Vacher had been complaining about the bullet ever since his days at the Dole asylum. Doctors there had proposed to remove it, but Vacher had not consented.

  Madeuf argued that regardless of any procedural infraction, researchers should have access to criminals like Vacher. Madeuf, as an ear, nose, and throat specialist, was working on a theory that certain damage to the inner ear might somehow trigger insanity. “In my opinion, if one had removed the bullet from Vacher, one might have avoided all the crimes.” Did the judge want to preside over another case like Menesclou’s, when it was only after the autopsy that doctors realized the killer probably was insane? Did he want that kind of injustice on his hands?

  “Enough!” commanded the judge. “Just respond to my questions.”

  Madeuf bemoaned the backward state of criminal science, explaining that his motive in sneaking in to examine the prisoner grew from a “hope to do service to French medicine.” The issue was larger than this particular defendant. Studies like his might help prevent “the hatching of future Vachers.”

  It was a passionate argument and, in retrospect, an enlightened one, but the judge, the jury, and spectators showed no indication of taking it seriously. The audience sat mute as Madeuf left the witness stand. Only Vacher applauded.

  As the day wore on, Vacher grew tired and dispirited. He listened to the remaining few witnesses with a distracted air, without gestures or clownish miming. At four o’clock, Ducher began his closing statement for the prosecution. With a solemn air and “grand gestures that seemed the result of studied preparation,” he described Vacher as “probably the greatest criminal in history.” He reminded the jury of the defendant’s life story, from his early days as a malicious, violent child to his troubled adolescence and then his violent behavior in the regiment. Ducher spoke about the shooting of Louise and how afterward Vacher simulated insanity. On hearing her name, Vacher sprang to life. He took off his hat, balled it up, and reared back to throw it at Ducher. Instantly, the guards pounced. In the melee that followed, the rabbit-fur hat was ripped to shreds. “Now look what you’ve done!” wailed Vacher. The judge warned Vacher that if he did not calm down, he would tell the guards to shackle him in irons. “I’d rather you did that than rip up my hat,” he cried.

  Ducher continued with his summation. He reminded the jury of Vacher’s time in the asylums, where, regardless of whether he was insane or merely faking, he was released with a document attesting to his cure. Ducher reviewed the circumstances of the Portalier murder. Then he recounted the rest of the killing spree and the experts’ evaluation of the crimes. “All have the same characteristics, the mark of the monster,” he said. “Each one required a sangfroid, and remarkable presence of mind in preparation and execution.”

  Ducher asserted that when Vacher originally confessed to Fourquet, he had hoped that the sheer number of his crimes would make a case for insanity. “But he could feel that the system was not succeeding,” said Ducher. “So he retreated into absolute silence and set himself to simulating insanity, but awkwardly, and with a visible lack of conviction.”

  Vacher was no lunatic, Ducher concluded, but a conscious, calculating predator “who spilled so much blood, and so many tears. You are his judges; you have seen all the examples. Then be without pity, members of the jury. His victims deserve it; you have that obligation to society. Render the verdict that society requires without pity!” Ducher had spoken for an hour and a half.

  The audience applauded long and enthusiastically, despite the president’s attempts to silence them.

  Now it was Charbonnier’s turn. His sonorous voice, with its great ability to communicate emotion, “impressed everyone,” according to reporters. Motioning to Vacher, he intoned, “This is not a great criminal, but a poor, sick man whom I have come to defend. If for three days we have been in an atmosphere of carnage and blood, we still do not have proof of his complete responsibility.”

  Like Ducher before him, Charbonnier reviewed Vacher’s life history for the jury, but through a radically different lens. He said that many of the stories about the defendant’s childhood had been exaggerated. Speaking of Vacher’s time in the regiment, he noted that the defendant had been a “good soldier” who had risen in the ranks and received an honorable discharge. “How could this man so proud of his sergeant stripes … find himself in the status of a vagabond living off of charity? Does that not certainly indicate some aberrations of his sanity?”

  Vacher listened, occasionally sobbing.

  Charbonnier spoke about Vacher’s rough treatment at the asylums, and cast doubt over whether the defendant had been cured. He questioned Dr. Dufour’s decision to release him: Perhaps Dufour had been so busy with other matters at the asylum that he had not given sufficient attention to Vacher. “Was he cured?” Charbonnier said of the defendant. “How much do you know about that? Where’s the proof?” Or could it be that once he was out of the asylum he experienced a relapse?

  The attorney took the jury through each of the murders, pointing out places where one could find fault with the experts. True, “all the crimes he committed were done in an automatic fashion,” but that indicated the behavior of an insane man rather than a rational one. He cautioned the jury that experts could make mistakes, even the redoubtable Dr. Lacassagne. He described an occasion in which an anthropological society had given Lacassagne a skull to examine, which he pronounced as that of a woman, whereas the skull actually had been that of an old man.

  Then Charbonnier made an interesting argument. This trial involved the fifth crime in Vacher’s killing spree, which had occurred a year and five months after his release from the Saint-Robert asylum. But what if he had been tried for his first crime—the murder of Eugénie Delhomme? That crime had occurred mere weeks after his discharge. Wouldn’t that murder, so soon after Vacher’s release, indicate that he had never been cured, that he was still alienated when he attacked her? And if he had been insane during that first killing, wouldn’t he still have been insane for all those that followed?

  This was not the first time that the question of timing had come up in an insanity trial. Eight years before, an inmate named James Dougherty escaped from the Flatbush asylum in Brooklyn, New York.4 Several weeks later, he returned and shot the director to death. When authorities tried him in criminal court, the Medico-Legal Society of New York objected. They said it was absurd to consider an escaped lunatic sane enough for a trial, when severa
l weeks earlier he had been officially alienated. “Had the homicide occurred while he was an inmate it seems incredible that he would have been tried at all,” said an editorial in the society’s journal. (The court sentenced him to life in an asylum.)

  Meanwhile, European experts increasingly worried about how and when to declare an alienated person cured. More and more crimes seemed to be committed by former patients or escapees from asylums. One journal, Les Annales médico-psychologiques (The Annals of Medical Psychology), featured a monthly column highlighting the predations of “insane people on the loose” (“aliénés en liberté”). Professional societies conducted earnest debates about how to determine when a lunatic had been cured. In Britain, the one country with a prison for the criminally insane, the inmates were given an indeterminate sentence literally at the “pleasure of the Queen,” which often meant perpetual confinement. In France, the United States, and many other countries, the individual asylum directors made the assessments, which, lacking firm benchmarks, often had dangerous consequences for society. Not only was Charbonnier’s argument intriguing but it touched on some of the deepest anxieties of the era’s medicolegal experts.

  Charbonnier spoke for three and a half hours, impressing everyone with his intelligence and humanity. He called for the jury to rise above their natural instinct for vengeance and serve justice in a higher way. “I don’t come to demand justice for one person, but for the honor of his family of fourteen brothers and sisters,” he said. He implored jurors not to think, “This is a wild beast, we must dispose of it,” but to temper their justice with understanding. “Vacher was insane, he still might be, and you have no right to suppress that fact in the interest of society.” He begged the jurors not to apply the death sentence. Acknowledging their fears of releasing a homicidal maniac to the questionable security of the state-run asylum system, he asked them to sentence his client to a lifetime of forced labor in prison. He reminded the jurors that “the court is not an abattoir, but a place where human beings are judged.” It was 9:00 p.m. by the time he sat down.

  In the French trial system, juries do not decide the simple question of innocence or guilt, but receive a list of questions from the judge to consider. Often this list can be rather long; not so in the Vacher case. De Coston asked the jury two simple questions: Did Vacher kill Victor Portalier on August 31, 1895? Did he commit the crime with premeditation?

  In the end, Charbonnier’s eloquence and appeal to the jurors’ humanity was trumped by the horror of the crimes and the authority of the experts. Surely the visual impact of the forensic sketches must have played a role, as did the overriding ethos at the time that the legal system must first and foremost protect society. It took the jury only fifteen minutes to return with their answers: yes to the killing; yes to premeditation. As Ducher had asked, the jurors delivered a verdict without pity; or rather, they had reserved their pity for the victims. The judge turned to the defendant. “What have you to say, Vacher?”

  “Are you condemning me to death?”

  “One has requested the death penalty for you.”

  “So be it,” Vacher replied calmly. “I say: curses to those who would condemn me.”

  On hearing the news, the mob outside began cheering wildly, chanting “Death! Death!” and surging against the cordon of soldiers. Inside, the spectators applauded raucously. As Vacher was led from the courtroom, he turned to them and shouted, “Good-bye!”

  A correspondent for Le Petit Bourguignon followed Vacher back to his cell. He reported that the convict sat down on his bench and, a few minutes later, asked for his dinner and heartily ate it. Then he lay down and started complaining about his hat. “Those bastards really fixed things for me, my poor hat!5 Of all the things they’ve done that’s the one that really gets me, because I’m a little superstitious.… And then, my lawyer! He’s a clever one to speak of the ’great principles of the Revolution’—it’s not strong! He turned them against me for sure. It would have been better to speak about Jesus Christ.… Anyway, I don’t give a damn, because I am condemned to death just like Him!” Then he rolled over. Moments later, the reporter could hear him rhythmically snoring.

  Twenty-one

  A Question of Sanity

  Immediately after the verdict, Charbonnier started working on an appeal. He published a forty-five-page booklet outlining the flaws in the prosecutor’s case as he saw them and sent it to the Justice Ministry.1 He also distributed it to the press. Charbonnier argued that the very premise of the trial was a sham. How could the judge try a man for a single homicide but admit selected evidence from ten others? Conversely, how could he have let ten murders go unexamined when the pattern of those murders, if carefully probed, could have shed light on the killer’s mentality?

  Charbonnier argued that even within the limited scope of the trial one could find evidence for Vacher’s insanity. He reprinted the testimony of former comrades in the regiment who described Vacher as “manic, deranged,” and “abnormal.” “We took him for a madman,” one former soldier had said. Charbonnier reprinted one of Vacher’s letters to his friends. “Who would dare say, after reading this letter, that Vacher was sane?” He reprinted the medical report by Dr. Guillemin at the asylum in Dole, highlighting the conclusions that Vacher suffered “attacks of mental alienation” that made him “irresponsible for his acts.” He devoted a section of his booklet to Dr. Dufour’s report from the Saint-Robert asylum, which certified that Vacher was cured. Charbonnier argued that the report was erroneous in its foundation. He cited an affidavit from Dr. Dufour, which said that when he admitted Vacher, he had no idea of the severity of his illness, because the patient arrived with the sketchiest of medical records. Based on those documents and discussions with Vacher, Dufour concluded that the patient suffered from a depression brought about by his broken engagement; he was certainly not someone with homicidal tendencies. With no information about Vacher’s past or his violent behavior at Dole, Dufour never realized how dangerous a man he had been dealing with. So when Vacher gave the appearance of rationality, it was enough for Dufour to order his release.

  Having made his argument for Vacher’s insanity, Charbonnier turned his attention to the medical experts, who he felt had acted less like scientists and more like hired guns. Going through the reports of Lacassagne and his colleagues, he found numerous places where they used prejudicial language, such as “vampire, cannibal, antisocial” and “anarchist.” He attacked the core of Lacassagne’s findings—that the methodical nature of Vacher’s actions ruled out the possibility of insanity. But was that assertion scientifically true? Several years earlier, in fact, Lacassagne had made the opposite case. In 1888, a doctor named Lamotte faced prosecution for raping three of his child patients. The doctor was clearly mentally impaired: Among other symptoms, he could not remember the names of his own children, or do simple addition and subtraction. Despite his infirmity, the prosecution argued that the doctor was rational because he made appointments in advance with his victims—which indicated planning, which, in turn, indicated premeditation. When the jury found the doctor guilty and legally responsible, Lacassagne protested, arguing that even though certain insane people retained the ability to plan and to distinguish right from wrong, they were helpless to resist certain impulses. That, he said, rendered them insane and legally irresponsible. Charbonnier argued that according to that reasoning, Lacassagne should have found Vacher legally irresponsible, as well. Why had the medical expert exhibited so much understanding for Dr. Lamotte and so little for a vagabond like Vacher? No doubt because of the severity of the crimes. “It would seem that the experts, despite the gravity of their mission, let themselves be influenced by public opinion,” he wrote. It was doubly absurd for the experts to contend that “Vacher did not kill in the manner of an insane person … as though it were perfectly ordinary for someone to cut throats, disembowel, and mutilate … without motive.”

  Charbonnier was not alone in his objections. Dr. Édouard Toulouse, medical direct
or of the Villejuif asylum in Paris and a prominent opponent of capital punishment, wrote a letter supporting Charbonnier, stating, “It is absolutely necessary to pardon this insane man.”2 Other alienists weighed in for the defense, including Dr. Lombroso, who classified Vacher as an epileptic, and Dr. Bonne, the current director of the Saint-Robert asylum.3 In the journal Opinion médicale, a Dr. Fourchon launched a broadside against the proceedings and Lacassagne, and he praised Dr. Madeuf for withstanding the judge’s “veritable fury” by daring to contradict the experts’ report.4

  Lacassagne did not respond to the criticism. He saw his role as that of a medical expert who presented the science and remained above the fray. But others did not hesitate to engage. Ducher warned the Justice Ministry in Paris not to be fooled by the defense’s imprecations or by Vacher’s theatrics:

  I have no trouble believing that Vacher never was insane, but has been feigning insanity since 1893 [after shooting Louise Barant].5 In any case, I am convinced that when he committed the crime at Bénonces he was not acting under an irresistible compulsion, but in full consciousness, taking all possible precautions, and yielding to his sexual perversion with the goal of satisfying his abominable passions. Under these conditions I feel that Vacher deserves not the slightest indulgence and … should be executed.

  The state prosecutor general, Moras, wrote a sixty-eight-page report minutely examining the evidence and offering not a sliver of tolerance for an insanity defense.6 De Coston sent a long and angry report to Paris, arguing that Vacher’s simulated insanity “was apparent, both to experts and inexperienced observers alike.”7 The killer’s legal responsibility was “affirmed by three eminent experts, established in the course of the trial, made clear by the discussions, and correctly proclaimed by the verdict of the jury.” De Coston pointed out that the issue had repercussions far beyond the courtroom. Vacher’s killing spree had spread terror throughout the countryside, and “the atrocities that surpassed all human imagination call out for the supreme expiation. Public opinion would certainly rise up in indignation if it were otherwise.”